by Michael Scammellin Issue:15 January 1999

The Black Book of Communism, which is finally appearing in English, is an extraordinary and almost unspeakably chilling book. It is a major study that deepens our understanding of Communism and poses a philosophical and political challenge that cannot be ignored. The book's central argument, copiously documented and repeated in upwards of a dozen different essays, is that the history of Communism should be read above all as the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques led by cruel dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, and dozens of imitators) who were murderously drunk on their own ideology and power.

There is also a second argument, formulated by Stephane Courtois in his introduction and his conclusion, and this is the argument that has provoked so much angry debate. It is that, given the nature and the magnitude of the crimes committed in its name, communism was fully the equal of Nazism as one of the supreme evils of our century.

Courtois is not proposing a cheap or unsubstantiated equivalence. He fully understands the enormity of the Nazis' 'Final Solution.' But he suggests that the ... relentless 'class genocide' of the Communists, conducted over eight decades, is fully comparable with the 'race genocide' of the Nazis. Both were 'crimes against humanity' as such horrors were first defined at Nuremberg and later codified by the United Nations.

Courtois also undertakes the unpopular but obvious task of doing a body count. The numbers that he comes up with are breathtaking. He counts between 85 and 100 million deaths directly attributable to Communism worldwide, extending over a period of 80 years. These astounding figures must be compared with about 25 million deaths for the Nazis over a period of six years.

Aware that he is treading on extremely delicate ground, Courtois cites the great Russian Jewish writer Vassily Grossman in his support. Grossman's mother was killed by the Nazis as part of their war against the Jews, and he was, with Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the editors of The Black Book on Nazi Crimes against the Jews. (The book was assembled in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, but it was forbidden to be published there; it appeared in Jerusalem three decades later.)

Grossman had written about Stalin's liquidation of the kulaks in the 1930s: 'To massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings.' And of the killing of the children of kulaks: 'That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish children into the Nazi gas chambers: 'You are not allowed to live, you are all Jews'!'

.c1.- Michael Scammell reviewing The Black Book of Communism recently published in English by Harvard University Press in the online version of The New Republic, December 12, 1999

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